Between World and Home: Tagore and Goethe

Abstract

What precisely is the nature of the need for the category of world literature? What would the introduction of this new category do to the valence of preexisting categories? To honor Adrienne Rich, how would the “world” function as location? What are the various paths to World Literature: Colonial, post-Colonial, politics, religion, spirituality, nationalism, trans-nationalism? Does each path propose a different world? What forms of knowing and unknowing, affirmation and self-reflexivity would such a location enable or preclude? Does the World have to be Home to be the World? Conversely, Does Home have to qualify as World before it becomes Home? Goethe and Tagore, as pioneers and theorists of World Literature, have wrestled and negotiated with these questions and issues, each in his own way: Goethe from a political stand point, and Tagore from a spiritual perspective that transcends politics altogether. This essay endeavors to articulate a location somewhere between Goethe' World as Home and Tagore's Home as World, and in the process mobilize a way of thinking that is forever “between.”